World War II has long been recognized as the largest, most costly and most far-reaching world war in modern history. In the entire Second World War, the Soviet-German War was recognized as one of the most tragic battlefields. Both the Soviet Union and Germany were one of the world's industrial powers at that time, and the industrial output of the two major countries was comparable, and the military technology was also different, and the strength of the two sides could be said to be equal. Therefore, the long-term fight between them is destined to be very tragic, not one of them!
In the war that took place in 1941 between the two "big Macs" of the Soviet Union and Germany, whether it was the victorious Soviet Union or the defeated Germany, the statistics of the losses of both sides in the war reached an astonishing level. According to incomplete statistics, Germany suffered nearly 10 million casualties in the war on the Eastern Front, and the german casualty rate on the Eastern Front was much higher than that on the Western Front, and "sending you to the Eastern Front" was the most cruel punishment for German officers and soldiers at that time.
Even more frightening is the Soviet Union, where 29.6 million people were killed or injured, including many innocent Soviet civilians killed in the shelling. A country of 170 million people suffered 18% of the population, and the Soviet Union won the final victory. Nearly a third of the country's total pre-war population died among young adults and a quarter of those who survived were disabled. In particular, 80 percent of young Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive the war.
Even later in the war, the Soviet Union may still have suffered heavy casualties because of its vengeance, and they still did not use some tactics to reduce casualties when they counterattacked, but continued to launch counterattacks in the sea of people, and even in the final battle of Berlin, 300,000 Soviet soldiers fell on the eve of Victory Day. There was even a scene in this battle: two German machine gunners together brought down the astonishing record of more than 600 Soviet troops, while only one of the two Germans died, and the other one was already crazy!
If you look at some of the soviet battles in the early stages, it is even more miserable, and their losses in some of the early battles are actually more than a hundred times that of the Germans. Sokolov was critical of Zhukov, the Soviet god of war, who once quoted another Soviet marshal as saying: "Zhukov must have 5 to 6 times more troops than the enemy... He would not fight at all, and his present position of prominence had been bought with countless blood. This sentence also applies to Stalin.
In fact, according to some current "declassified historical data", the Soviet casualties in some victorious battles were at least three times that of the Germans, and the above version of Sokolov was more exaggerated: seven to one Soviet casualty, seven Casualties, one German. According to the "pro-Soviet" "Collision of Giants", the Soviet Union lost more than 29 million people in the entire war, but Germany also lost 9 million people, about three points to one.
The version of The Secret Archives of World War II is completely different: the Soviet death toll is 26 million, and the German army is 2.6 million, ten to one! The number of Soviet casualties in the official Soviet data is only less than 9 million, of course, everyone knows the convention of this data, and can only be used as a reference. However, this series of cold figures reflects the fierceness of the Soviet-German battle, and the fierceness of other European battlefields in the same period is completely incomparable with this Soviet-German war!
But if you look back at this war, in fact, it may not have been the Soviet Union that was originally hard to shoulder with Germany, and at the beginning of the outbreak of World War II in Europe, it was very likely that with the size of France, and Germany would have a war as tragic as The First World War, but the French were much smarter, and they unexpectedly chose to surrender quickly in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the First World War.
After the western front of Europe there was no war, the German army faced the United Kingdom across the sea, and it was powerless, the British air war was just an air battle, and the lethality of millions of troops on land was still incomparable, and the navy could not defeat Britain, so the choice of history finally pushed the Soviet Union in the East like a piece of fat meat to Hitler, and the Soviet Union was doomed to escape the nazi claws at this time!
In fact, the outbreak of the Soviet-German war was also due to Hitler's misjudgment, when he launched the "Barbarossa Operation", his original intention was to use blitzkrieg to knock down the Soviet Union's "broken house" in an instant, and in his heart he thought that the Soviet Union was as vulnerable as France. But since watching the moscow minarets get farther and farther away, Hitler's wishful thinking has been completely shattered, and both the Soviet Union and Germany have been mired in a terrible war quagmire ever since.
In order not to lose this war (because no one can afford to lose), Germany, which had only 80 million people at that time, could be said to have exhausted everything on the Soviet battlefield, and operation Barbarossa alone mobilized more than five million people, knowing that the total strength of the German army at that time was only 8.5 million, of which 1.25 million were civilian and other auxiliary personnel, which shows that the Germans used almost all the elite.
If you include the subsequent losses to replenish the source of troops, Germany has invested more than ten million troops in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union has of course poured more than seventeen million soldiers into the country. In this way, the two European powers with equal strength are completely attrition behind them, and the more the two countries fight, the more red-eyed they become, and both sides are not killed.
And the impact of the Soviet-German battlefield on the entire World War II is of course also very huge, this war directly accelerated the entire anti-fascist war process, it can be said that even completely changed the direction of the entire war, the Soviet Union after fighting Germany, they have been like a piece of cake" when they fight Japan again, the Soviet Union for the final defeat of the fascist camp for the world is indeed indispensable!
"History Miscellaneous Station"